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By Tony Hallett, 23 March 2007 14:30

COMMENT

You'd think I'd be more aware than most about how news spreads these days across the internet, how aggregator sites such as Google News can pull together hundreds of stories on the same subject or even how word of mouth now means word of email, with all the viral connotations.

Well, I just had a stark reminder.

Yesterday lunch time I got to interview the CEO of SAP, Henning Kagermann. I was at a briefing, which was shared with three other competing journalists. Lots of good ground was covered - more of that in a moment - but of course as I filed the copy moments ago there was the small matter of what had happened in the interim.

SAP CEO speaks

Henning Kagermann on software as a service and why ERP won't go open source. Read the full story.

Searching under "SAP + Oracle" in Google News now shows me (at latest count) 700 articles on the subject of Oracle bringing legal action against its German arch-rival. The details of the accusations can be read on silicon.com here, though I'd understand if you said you saw it somewhere else.

Most of these pieces started to hit the web around about the time I was going home from work, around 18:00(GMT), and built up overnight.

I'm thinking - though haven't checked for sure - that Kagermann didn't know about the lawsuit when the interview was taking place.

So I had an interesting chat with our news editor over IM this morning. Can I still write the original story when, understandably, readers would think: Why didn't you ask him about the Oracle action?

So my rather post-modern response is being able to explain the course of events in a blog posting like this - as well as still hoping there is some value in the original story idea, about the company not concentrating only on large customers and about Kagermann's claim there is "no open source ERP software I can see that is any good". You can read the news story here.

Setting aside the Oracle vs SAP legal papers and the subject of our news piece, it remains for me to mention a couple of other elements from the meeting. First, there is the frantic pace of competition in what could be called Big Software. For SAP, that means battling Oracle, now home to a number of products that used to be under the wings of various competitors; upstarts, frequently peddling on-demand wares and doing pretty well at it too; and even a sometime friend, sometime foe in the form of Microsoft.

I mentioned open source already, and time will tell whether SAP's position ends up sounding complacent, but a final consideration is pirated software.

I asked him about emerging markets and he had a good answer as to why packaged software can bring lots of benefits there. But speaking about SAP ERP, his answer made me laugh.

He said: "It is too difficult or too risky to run SAP without links to the company."

He cited software moving on, through innovation or, say, legal changes beyond the software that have to be built in, but the idea of a factory in the middle of nowhere in China pirating SAP (at what cost saving?!) and somehow getting away with it beggars belief.

Do let me know if you've heard of such a thing.